Pacifica Quartet
Simin Ganatra, violin | Austin Hartman, violin | Mark Holloway, viola | Brandon Vamos, cello
“...nothing short of phenomenal... ”
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Formed in 1994, the Pacifica Quartet quickly won chamber music’s top competitions, including the 1998 Naumburg Chamber Music Award. In 2002 the ensemble was honored with Chamber Music America’s Cleveland Quartet Award and the appointment to Lincoln Center’s The Bowers Program (formerly CMS Two), in 2006 was awarded a prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant, and in 2009 was named Musical America’s “Ensemble of the Year.” With its powerful energy and captivating, cohesive sound, the Pacifica has established itself as the embodiment of the American quartet sound.
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Having given highly acclaimed performances of the complete Carter cycle in San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and Houston; the Mendelssohn cycle in Napa, Australia, New York, and Pittsburgh; and the Beethoven cycle in New York, Denver, St. Paul, Chicago, Napa, and Tokyo (in an unprecedented presentation of five concerts in three days at Suntory Hall), the Quartet presented the monumental Shostakovich cycle in Chicago, New York, Montreal, and at London’s Wigmore Hall. The Quartet has been widely praised for these cycles, with critics calling the concerts “brilliant,” “astonishing,” “gripping,” and “breathtaking.”
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An ardent advocate of contemporary music, the Pacifica Quartet commissions and performs many new works including those by Keeril Makan, Julia Wolfe, and Shulamit Ran, the latter in partnership with the Music Accord consortium, London’s Wigmore Hall, and Tokyo’s Suntory Hall. The work – entitled Glitter, Doom, Shards, Memory – had its New York debut as part of the Chamber Music Society at Lincoln Center Series.
Most recently, together with soprano Karen Slack, the Pacifica Quartet premiered to tremendous acclaim a new song cycle by composer James Lee III commissioned by Carnegie Hall and the Shriver Hall Concert Series, entitled “Double Standard.” The work is based on the poem of the same name by the prolific Black poet Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, who was a free Black woman in the 19th century from Baltimore.
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The members of the Pacifica Quartet live in Bloomington, IN, where they have served as quartet-in-residence and full-time faculty members at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music since 2012. They spend time each summer at the Aspen Music Festival and School where they direct the Center for Advanced Quartet Studies. Prior to their appointment, the Quartet was on the faculty of the University of Illinois at Champaign Urbana from 2003 to 2012, and also served as resident performing artist at the University of Chicago for seventeen years.
With a career spanning three decades, the multiple Grammy Award-winning Pacifica Quartet has achieved international recognition as one of the finest chamber ensembles performing today. The Quartet is known for its virtuosity, exuberant performance style, and often-daring repertory choices. Having served as quartet-in-residence at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music for over a decade, the Quartet was also previously the quartet-in-residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 2021, the Pacifica Quartet received a second Grammy Award for Contemporary Voices, an exploration of music by three Pulitzer Prize-winning composers: Shulamit Ran, Jennifer Higdon, and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich.
Formed in 1994, the Pacifica Quartet quickly won chamber music’s top competitions, including the 1998 Naumburg Chamber Music Award. In 2002 the ensemble was honored with Chamber Music America’s Cleveland Quartet Award and the appointment to Lincoln Center’s The Bowers Program (formerly CMS Two), and in 2006 was awarded a prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant. With its powerful energy and captivating, cohesive sound, the Pacifica has established itself as the embodiment of the senior American quartet sound.
Upcoming season highlights include performances for Chamber Music Monterey Bay, 92nd Street Y, San Francisco Performances, Library of Congress, Amelia Island Chamber Music Festival, DePaul University, and Friends of Chamber Music-Vancouver.
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The Pacifica Quartet has proven itself the preeminent interpreter of string quartet cycles, harnessing the group’s singular focus and incredible stamina to portray each composer’s evolution, often over the course of just a few days. Having given highly acclaimed performances of the complete Carter cycle in San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and Houston; the Mendelssohn cycle in Napa, Australia, New York, and Pittsburgh; and the Beethoven cycle in New York, Denver, St. Paul, Chicago, Napa, and Tokyo (in an unprecedented presentation of five concerts in three days at Suntory Hall), the Quartet presented the monumental Shostakovich cycle in Chicago, New York, Montreal, and at London’s Wigmore Hall. The Quartet has been widely praised for these cycles, with critics calling the concerts “brilliant,” “astonishing,” “gripping,” and “breathtaking.”
An ardent advocate of contemporary music, the Pacifica Quartet commissions and performs many new works including those by Keeril Makan, Julia Wolfe, and Shulamit Ran, the latter in partnership with the Music Accord consortium, London’s Wigmore Hall, and Tokyo’s Suntory Hall. The work – entitled Glitter, Doom, Shards, Memory – had its New York debut as part of the Chamber Music Society at Lincoln Center series.
In 2008 the Quartet released its Grammy Award-winning recording of Carter’s Quartets Nos. 1 and 5 on the Naxos label; the 2009 release of Quartets Nos. 2, 3, and 4 completed the two-CD set. Cedille Records released the group’s four-CD recording of the entire Shostakovich cycle, paired with other contemporary Soviet works, to rave reviews: “The playing is nothing short of phenomenal.” (Daily Telegraph, London) Other recent recording projects include Leo Ornstein’s rarely heard piano quintet with Marc-André Hamelin with an accompanying tour, the Brahms piano quintet with the legendary pianist Menahem Pressler, the Brahms and Mozart clarinet quintets with clarinetist Anthony McGill, and their Grammy Award-winning Contemporary Voices album.
The members of the Pacifica Quartet live in Bloomington, IN, where they serve as quartet-in-residence and full-time faculty members at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music. Prior to their appointment, the Quartet was on the faculty of the University of Illinois at Champaign Urbana from 2003 to 2012, and also served as resident performing artist at the University of Chicago for seventeen years.
For more information on the Quartet, please visit www.pacificaquartet.com.
August 2024 – Please do not edit without permission.
Videos
Programs & Repertoire
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PROGRAM I
POETIC VOICES: “ON SONGS OF LOVE, LITANY, AND LOSS”Antonín Dvořák: Cypresses, B. 152 (1865)
Arnold Schoenberg: String Quartet No. 2 (1908)
(Celebrating Schoenberg’s 150th Anniversary 1874-2024)
*****
Franz Schubert: String Quartet in D Minor, D. 810 “Death & the Maiden” (1824)Throughout history, people from varied backgrounds and walks of life have used the human voice, coupled with expressive poetry and prose, to convey the wide range of human emotion. Poetic Voices is a program that celebrates the impact of vocal poetry on some of chamber music’s finest works, giving audiences the rare opportunity to hear these masterpieces juxtaposed with performances of the original songs on which they are based, as performed in collaboration with Metropolitan Operas soprano Karen Slack. (Note: this program can also be performed without a singer.)
Opening this program is the heartfelt work of a 24 year old Antonín Dvořák who, being in love with a young woman, wrote a series of 18 lyrical songs for voice and piano that he later transcribed for quartet and titled Cypresses. As a counterpoint to these love songs, the program turns to celebrate the 150th Anniversary of Arnold Schoenberg, paying tribute to his tremendous contributions to chamber music through the presentation of his String Quartet No. 2, which includes fervent vocal litanies. The program concludes with Schubert’s iconic String Quartet in D Minor “Death and the Maiden”, based on Schubert’s lied “Der Tod und das Mädchen'' with text by Matthias Claudius, which famously tells the story of a personified Death providing comfort to a young Maiden who anxiously faces her own mortality.
Note: If the program is presented without voice, instead of Schoenberg, the quartet would play the Mendelssohn Quartet, based on a love song that he wrote as a teenage prodigy.
PROGRAM II
AMERICAN SNAPSHOTS: “JFK, VIETNAM, AND ELLIS ISLAND”Samuel Barber: String Quartet in B Minor, Op. 11 (1935)
George Crumb: Black Angels (1970) -or- Charles Ives: String Quartet No. 2 (1913)
*****
Antonín Dvořák: String Quartet in F Major, Op. 96 “American” (1893)American Snapshots is a musical “photo album” that presents three masterpieces from the chamber music repertoire, inviting listeners to absorb the expressive genius of each composition while also reflecting on each work’s important connection to a significant moment from America’s history.
Opening with Barber’s String Quartet in B minor (that includes his moving Adagio for Strings), this first musical snapshot gives listeners the opportunity to reflect on November 25, 1963, when the Adagio for Strings brought a cathartic calm to a grieving nation as conducted by Toscanini at JFK’s funeral, thereby memorializing this piece as one of the most performed works during times of national mourning. The second American snapshot is George Crumb’s revolutionary work Black Angels “Thirteen Images from the Dark Land” for Electric String Quartet that features an amplified string quartet, crystal glasses, thimbles, a glass stirring rod, and two suspended tam-tam gongs. It was written as a threnody (ode or lament) to the Vietnam War in 1970 and conceived as “a kind of parable on our troubled contemporary world” (Crumb 1971). The final snapshot presents a reminder of the positive moments when America welcomed visitors from other countries, inspiring composers to create new styles and sounds based on America’s rich musical landscape. From the song of the scarlet tanager to musical cadences of the African American Spiritual, we experience the substantial impact of Dvořák’s visit to Spillville, Iowa in his beloved “American” String Quartet.
PROGRAM III
FROM DUSK TO DAWN: “A HUNGARIAN METAMORPHOSIS”György Ligeti: String Quartet, No. 1, “Metamorphoses nocturnes” (1958)
Béla Bartók: String Quartet No. 4, BB 95, Sz. 91 (1928)
*****
Franz Joseph Haydn: String Quartet in B-flat major, Op. 76, No. 4, “Sunrise” (1797)
From Dusk to Dawn is a program that features the evocative sounds and colors of our circadian rhythms while specifically focusing on three works that each highlight the metamorphic Hungarian influences on the string quartet from the genre’s origins in the late 18th Century to the present.The first half of the program highlights two works from two of Hungary’s finest composers. The program opens first with the nocturnal dream-like music of György Ligeti’s String Quartet No. 1 “Metamorphoses Nocturnes” that Ligeti credits as being strongly rooted in his admiration for Béla Bartók. Highlighting the musical connection between these countrymen, the program follows with Bartók’s String Quartet No. 4. Arguably Bartók’s finest work and an example of the powerful influence of Hungarian folk music on his compositional style, the quartet features a whole movement dedicated to night music. The program culminates in a tribute to the Hungarian Count Joseph Georg von Erdődy whose generous patronage of Franz Joseph Haydn, the father of the string quartet, merited the beloved String Quartet Op. 76, No. 4 “Sunrise” that was described in a letter from the time as being composed, “not of a sublime genius who has written so much and so well already, but of one of highly-cultivated talents, who had expended none of his fire before.”
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PROGRAM I
RAVEL AT 150 : PARISIENNE INSPIRATION (1875-2025)Claude Debussy: String Quartet in G minor, Op. 10
Ruth Crawford Seeger: String Quartet (1931)
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Maurice Ravel: String Quartet in F majorIn 2025, to honor the 150th anniversary of French composer Maurice Ravel (1875-1937), the Pacifica Quartet celebrates the legacy of this esteemed master with an evening of string quartets from innovators who found musical inspiration during their time in Paris. Specifically, the program showcases Ravel’s mastery of innovative compositional techniques based not only on ethnic sounds and impressionistic musical colors, but also on the inspiration of the G Minor Quartet of his contemporary Claude Debussy (also featured on this program). Rounding out this concert experience is the String Quartet (1931) of Ruth Crawford Seeger, who composed her most well-known work following her time on a Guggenheim Fellowship absorbing the influences of Paris, where she received mentorship from one of Paris’s greats, Nadia Boulanger. This menagerie of works creates a powerful program that celebrates new innovative practices from Paris while highlighting their dynamic impact on the future progression of western music.
PROGRAM II
AMERICAN RETROSPECTIVE: RECOGNIZING AMERICA’S 250TH ANNIVERSARY (1776-2026)Charles Ives: String Quartet No. 1, “From the Salvation Army”
Erich Korngold: String Quartet No. 3 in D major, Op. 34
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Antonín Dvořák: String Quartet in F major, Op. 96, “American”To recognize the historic Semiquincentennial (250th anniversary) of America in 2026, the Pacifica Quartet features three works for string quartet in an anniversary retrospective that creates a musical collage based on the musical themes from the American Experience. From the incorporation of American hymn tunes in the first quartet of Charles Ives, to the popular sounds from Hollywood’s silver screen in the String Quartet No. 3 of Korngold, to the indigenous folk influences found in Dvorak’s beloved “American” Quartet, this program gives listeners a unique opportunity to celebrate the diversity of America’s musical landscape captured over its 250-year history.
PROGRAM III
TRANSCENDENCECharles Ives: String Quartet No. 2
James Lee III: String Quartet No. 3, "Untranslatable"
*****
Ludwig van Beethoven: String Quartet in B-flat major, Op. 130Based on the thematic narrative of Charles Ives’s String Quartet No. 2 that he described as a string quartet comprised of four individuals who “converse, discuss, argue, fight, shake hands, shut up then walk up the mountain side to view the firmament”, Transcendence is a timely and much-needed program for our world today. It showcases a collaborative journey between four individuals that, while different, work to create a transcendent unity culminating in a powerful “view [of] the firmament”. In addition to Ives’s 2nd Quartet, the program also features a new work by James Lee III (String Quartet No. 3, “Untranslatable”) that musically depicts words in foreign languages (e.g. Nigerian and Hebrew) that manage to transcend the limitations of the English language while conveying a richness of meaning centered on the universal emotions of anguish, anticipation, kindness, longing, and elation. The program culminates in Beethoven’s own personal expression of spiritual transcendence in his inspired late String Quartet Op. 130 that includes his groundbreaking Grosse Fuge.
Projects
